On January 22 the French social partners left the negotiation table without concluding any agreement on reforms to the current system of employee representation (see article n°8840). Four months ago the Government invited both unions and employers to tackle this issue, even if in reality their first joint attempts to modernize social dialogue actually date back as far as 2009. For Tom HAYES, Executive Director of BEERG (the Brussels European Employee Relations Group), there was nothing surprising about the unsuccessful outcome. He argues that the social partners are in fact the least apt to negotiate for themselves and for a balance of power.
In its piece on Friday (see article n°8840), Planet Labor outlined what was on the negotiating table during the, ultimately unsuccessful, talks between the employers and the unions on the “modernisation of social dialogue” in France. In return for agreeing to an indirect form of employee representation in companies with less than 11 employees, the employers, principally MEDEF, wanted the unions to accept the creation of a single instance of employee representation in all companies with more tha
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